[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, it's really wonderful to be here.
I forgot my reading glasses, so I borrowed Jim's and now I
can't see you.
[LAUGHTER]
I first came to Tucson from an invitation from the Poetry
Center 20 years ago.
And I did not know then that I was going to marry a Tucson
girl, I did not know I was going to have a Tucson family whom
I love deeply and got attached to as I
got attached to this place.
And I had never had an imagination of this place.
I just got invited, I thought Oh, great, I got off the plane.
Was picked up by Lois Shelton, didn't know who she was,
was driven, but I knew her husband's poetry.
I had read it, was driven in town and thought,
what a weird place.
[LAUGHTER]
Then to the Saguaro, an Octatillo,
I didn't even know the names then,
I just looked with wonder, saw the mountains,
saw the beauty of the setting, but it was very strange to me.
And when I got dropped off, I immediately
as one does in a new place, I went out to take a walk
and came to Speedway.
And said, I see this is a sort of Los Angeles laid out
over the desert, it didn't feel to me like a real place.
[LAUGHTER]
And I went into the poetry cottage, the old poetry cottage
with the Poetry Center and on the wall were--
the first thing you saw was a great scrawled bit
of a poem in Russian by Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
which is impressive enough.
A scrawled bit of a poem written on the wall by Stanley Kunitz.
A scrawled bit of a poem written on the wall
by Kenneth Rexroth, who for me coming from California
was a personal hero.
I got to touch the place where he had written on the wall um
bits of poems by--
from the fantastic early book The Lost Pilot
by my contemporary James Tate, poem by --
a scrap of a poem by Maxine Kumin, scrap
of a poem by Denise Levertov.
I felt I was in one of the most magical places
that I had ever been.
And was made to feel at home and, you know,
stay for a few days, and get to know Tucson.
And I'm afraid I thought what's to know when I heard
this invitation, the place was also
full of books about the desert.
The poems of Dick Shelton were there.
I had read some of them but I got
to sit down and read a book of them.
I got to look at the early writings of Gary
Nabhan about the desert, pick up old books
about the cacti of Arizona, old books about the Sonoran desert.
And I understood that what the Poetry Center was,
seeing this overlay of this extraordinary place,
the Sonoran desert with this old mission settlement of Tucson
grown into an American city with its Native American roots.
And I understood what the Poetry Center was.
That it was a place that had found--
got profoundly attached to and was
growing a culture, out of the Natural History traditions,
out of the Native American traditions, out
of the Mexican-American traditions,
and out of this tradition that came
from the American public University.
From this idea that the young were
going to be educated for free or near to free,
in the culture of their place.
It was an amazement to me those days
and it gave me an idea of what it
might mean to be an American culture
and how it was going to get made region by region and place
by place out of the particular magics
and biologies and theologies of a place.
I don't know if you know, this 40th anniversary
of the poetry that are how much it's meant to American poets
all over the country for the last 40 years.
In the map of the United States in peoples'
heads one of the magical places, a cottage where writers could
always come and stay for a few days
with that extraordinary library if they needed a respite.
I don't know if that's still true
but it was true 20 years ago, that if you needed
a few days to do some writing call Dick and Lois and say,
could I use the cottage for a few days,
to finish the piece of writing?
So many American writers have done that over the years
and come back with stories to tell
about walking in the desert.
I remember not long before he died, on my second visit here,
walking out to the Desert Museum with Ray Carver, who
knew he was dying of cancer.
And we were-- there was that big sign about all
the different creature life of the desert
as you come into the Desert Museum and I glanced at it,
I'd seen it before and I walked out eager to get out
and it was the cacti were blossoming,
I was anxious to get out and see them.
And I looked around and Ray Carver
was still standing there looking at the sign and I went back.
At the top of it, the writing is all here, the top of it
there's a snake about to enter a hole.
And down here at the bottom of it, there's some little rodent,
cowering, with...the snake is going to come in and Ray was
standing there looking at it, just looking at it.
And said, yeah.
And then we set out and walked around.
I think that was the last time I saw him before his death
and it's a great contemplator of how people were up against it
and wrote about it in brilliant ways.
So I have many memories, grateful memories of this place
and I don't know if you know, some of you
do how much this Poetry Center is
meant to American poets over the last 40 years.
And how much it's been a model for the way
that one might attach literature to a place.
15 years ago, when James Thurber's home
in Columbus, Ohio went up for sale um the University bought
it under the inspiration of Michael Rosen, a poet who
spent a couple of days at the Poetry Center
here and wanted to do for central Ohio,
something like the Poetry Center here
had done for the Sonoran desert.
To make it a cultural center that reflected and dug
into the deepest spiritual and physical qualities of a region.
Recently, the home of Theodore Roethke
first, important American poet of German background, his dad
owned a wholesale florist business in upper Michigan.
His house in Saginaw became available
and again a committee was formed to try
to buy that house in order to create
a place for a museum, and a library,
and a place where there might be poetry readings for writers
to hang out, that would also be a library of the biology
and culture of the upper Midwest and of the Great Lakes.
The, offhand, the two models I could think of that
spoke directly out of what was created by you here
in the Arizona Poetry Center.
It's quite an amazing resource that you've done wonders
to create it and to sustain it and to make
through it a connection between the arts and the natural world
and the historical cultures of the place
that really grows the place.
Makes a culture where there will be a lot of people
that make that effort.
So I'm really thrilled and honored
to get to be here on this 40th anniversary of the Poetry
Center.